Vehicle traffic management involves the policies and infrastructure used to manage vehicular traffic flow in a large-scale road system such as a roadway system associated with a municipality or a government controlled highway system. The goal of a vehicle traffic management system is to maximize traffic flow through the system while maintaining a safe environment.
Vehicle traffic management systems consist of roads that intersect and such intersections offer vehicles the opportunity to choose between several routes to their final destination. Throughout a roadway system, controllers may exist for controlling flow between routes; an exemplary embodiment of a controller may be a traffic light which repeatedly modifies its state to determine how vehicles should proceed.
Vehicle traffic management may involve manual as well as automated techniques. An exemplary embodiment of a manual vehicle traffic management system may involve human administrators that monitor traffic flow from a central location and manipulate the system's controllers in response to traffic congestion. An exemplary embodiment of an automated vehicle traffic system may involve a computer system that monitors traffic flow and uses algorithms to automatically manipulate the system's controllers in response to traffic congestion.
As populations expand and the number of vehicles on roadways continues to increase, the process of managing traffic becomes an increasingly difficult task. The disadvantage of manual vehicle management systems is that they are limited in response time by the human operators. As roadway systems grow in complexity, the human response time becomes a formidable limitation. Automated vehicle traffic management systems are not constrained by the speed limitations that manual systems face. One advantage of automated vehicle traffic management systems is that they can be implemented in a distributed manner. A distributed implementation of an automated vehicle management system can enable very fast operation.
A plethora of controllers are available for use by vehicle traffic management systems. An exemplary traffic controller is a direction routing system such as Yahoo!Maps, MapQuest, Google Maps and other online tools. The current realization of these tools is to formulate the complete route prior to the beginning of a vehicle's trip. A modification of these tools may involve incorporation of real time traffic so that the route can be iteratively updated as the trip progresses. An automated system in which real time traffic allows for iteratively updated routes offers many advantages such as quick response to encountered congestion. One key feature that such a system would not offer is a technique for preventing traffic congestion.